Murphy & the Bear

The Navajo have a name for wintertime when they perform their ceremonials: “The Season When the Thunder Sleeps.”

With that in mind, I’ve decided to name summertime “The Season When Tom and Julie Don’t Sleep.”

For the past few weeks, we have been plagued by a bear trying to get into our dumpster in the middle of the night. Ever vigilant, Murphy the Lodgedog nightly has been pitching six fits at about three in the morning when the critter starts to rattle the dumpster. 

This is a smaller and younger bear than the one the size of an Escalade that got into our neighboring lodge a couple of summers ago, broke into their walk-in freezer, and ate all their ice cream.

But though young, he’s already gotten in trouble before. About a week ago, Murphy started barking, roused us out of sleep, and I shambled down to the storeroom to turn on the outside light to see what the matter was. Julie shouted down from the balcony, “Tom! Don’t open the door! There’s a bear out there!” So naturally, I opened to door, and sure enough there was a bear on the other side of the road from the dumpster. He boasted a white ear-tag: a sure sign that the Division of Wildlife had already had at least one run-in with him.

I was so mad at being awakened in the middle of the night that I stood there in bare feet and boxer shorts, waved my arms and shouted, “Get outta here! Go on! Git!”

The bear looked surprised, said, “Whoaaa?” and ran up the mountain.

Murphy was beside herself. She literally could not stop barking, and for the rest of the night, the slightest noise would set her off. 

It has been like that every night since. We haven’t been this sleep-deprived since our son was a collicky infant and I briefly considered drowning him in the bathtub.

Just last night, Murphy went off again. We didn’t see the bear this time, and I briefly wondered if it might be our neighborhood evil raccoon, but this morning the dumpster had been moved, so it was clear that the bear had been back. 

Since we seem unable to convince Murphy to be a less-ambitious watchdog, it’s time to start filling balloons with a dilute ammonia solution and putting them on the lid of the dumpster. Bears, whose sense of smell is tremendous--even better than that of dogs--do not like the smell of ammonia, so perhaps if our bear gets a whiff of the stuff, he’ll leave us alone.

If not, just about the time it becomes The Season When the Thunder Sleeps and the bear goes into hibernation, it will also be The Season When Tom and Julie Sleep, as well.

Green

There is a green that is greener than green, and that green is yellow.

About three weeks ago, around the first of June, in one day we watched the pasture turn green. There were still patches of snow, but the sun was (finally!) warm, and over the course of just a few hours, green stuff sprang to life amid the brown and gray straw of the dead grasses and weeds. In the days that followed, the pasture just got greener, until you didn't think the color could possibly become more saturated.

Then the dandelions started to bloom. Just when you didn't think it could get any more green, the bright yellow deepened the color. Right now, the pasture looks like God threw a staggering quantity of gold dust onto a carpet of emeralds.

The aspens also have leafed out. They bring their own quality of green to the mix. They start out almost yellow when the leaf buds burst open, but as they drink in the sunshine, their color darkens. Years ago, I went on a backpacking trip down in the San Juans in late June, and we walked through a spectacular aspen forest that reminded me of JRR Tolkein's description of elven woods in The Lord of the Rings.

Even the willows have given up their early-spring orange hope. And as the sun goes down, the manes and tails of the horses grazing down there are back-lit and seem to be made of silver.

Lordy! Living up here is turning me into a romantic. Wordsworth would have loved it up here; so would his wife, Dorothy. We don't have the drop-dead views of the Continental Divide and the Indian Peaks (you have to walk to the other side of the pasture to enjoy that spectacular view), but Sheep Mountain to the west, while less dramatic, is no less beautiful. We are learning to love the shadows and highlights the sun makes in its various declivities.

To the end of my days, I will always associate the color green with quiet. Not necessarily silence, mind you. Right now, between the wind (more that a Wordsworthian "gentle breeze", the ceaseless buzz of the hummingbirds, and the swallows quarreling and copulating under the eves, the place is hardly silent. But it's still quiet with the best sort of quiet.

Suede comes to the High Mountain Lodge

Long before we were married, I knew that Julie loved horses. After we got married 28+ years ago, she had a horse for a while that she kept in stables and pastures close to our old house in Golden. However, the struggles to be a family and raise a son made it hard for her to follow her passion, and she eventually had to postpone that dream; there were many times when she wondered if it would ever be fulfilled.

Most of our marriage has been about me pursuing my goals, though over the years we did talk (sometimes very heatedly) about what the future would look like when it was "her turn." And I promised her many, many times that someday it would, indeed, be "her turn." So when I got laid off in 2008, and after a few months it became evident that the economy wasn't going to let me go out and "get another job" as I'd always been able to do in the past, we began exploring all those fantasies about what our future life might look like that we'd played with over the years.

It was a fluke that we hit upon the idea of running a Bed & Breakfast. Julie's aunt and uncle had run one for a few years in North Carolina, and we'd toyed with the idea of having one as a "stepdown" to retirement, but in the constellation of our retirement fantasies, it didn't really stand out among all the others. But on the way home from spending one of our unemployed weekends at the family cabin in the mountains, we drove past a motel overlooking the Continental Divide that we'd always joked about looking into buying if it ever came on the market.

Low and behold, there was a For Sale sign out front. We wrote down the number, called the listing agent, and a few days later, had a showing. We really liked the place, but as we were debriefing afterwards in a little roadhouse we were fond of, it became clear that, if we were going to follow the innkeeping path, we would have to acquire some skills and knowledge we didn't currently possess. Low and behold, in the lobby of the roadhouse was a Denver Free University catalog and one of the courses offered was, you guessed it, "So You Want To Own a B&B."

Long story short, we took the class, and the teachers, Becky and Roxanne, became our real estate brokers, and they ultimately negotiated the sale of the High Mountain Lodge for us.

But lordy, did we drag them through a few knotholes before we bought the place. As we began looking for an inn to buy, we began to clarify what we wanted. "Where will we put our books?" was one of our early mantras. "You have too many books," Roxanne told me. "Get rid of them. They clutter up the owner's quarters, and potential buyers have trouble imagining their own stuff there."

"We haven't even bought a place yet, and already you're working on helping us sell it?"

She narrowed her eyes. "It's never too early to plan."

Then after they started filtering our searches for books, we saw a place we really liked. "But where will we put the piano?" Julie asked.

"What piano?" asked Roxanne through gritted teeth.

"Oh, the 7-foot antique Steinway in the parlor," said Julie.

Roxanne muttered something, but I didn't catch what she said.

Then we saw the High Mountain Lodge. "Oh, Tom!" Julie exclaimed. "Look at those pastures! There's even a place for the horses!"

"What horses?" Roxanne demanded shrilly, the pitch of her voice inching upward. "You don't have horses! Do you?" Becky tried to shush her.

"Not yet," said Julie sweetly.

It was then that I realized that Julie's "turn," so long postponed, was about to take place.

The first year at the Lodge, we didn't have a moment to spare to think about acquiring a horse. We were too busy cleaning and decorating and cleaning some more, all the while figuring out how to be innkeepers and welcome the wonderful people who began to visit the lodge.

Then earlier this summer, it became clear that we weren't going to have time to do the prep work to get a horse; we didn't have time to get the fences in order, and it was clear that horses would have to wait another year.

That was before our neighbor approached us a few weeks ago and offered to give us a 3-year-old Rocky Mountain Horse mare named Suede. I almost fell out of my chair, I was so surprised. Suede has a club foot and so, though she is from champion bloodlines that helped establish the breed, she can't be shown and shouldn't be bred. But she's a sweet little girl, and she now belongs to Julie.

Julie is overjoyed and is busy plotting how we can get our son and his 20-something friends up to help us with a fence-building party sometime before the snow flies. "I knew God was going to give me a horse," she noted. "I just didn't know when or what kind of horse it was going to be.

So now, we know.

The Summer of the Hummingbird

In keeping with Native American and Asian ways of remembering events, the summer of 2010 at the High Mountain Lodge promises to go down in the Beckwith Family Annals as the Summer of the Hummingbird.

Looking West from the Deck of the High Mountain Lodge

As I write this out on the deck of the High Mountain Lodge, a swarm of 12 to 18 hummingbirds (surely the collective noun for hummingbirds must be a "swarm" and not a "charm" as one website reports) are fighting a pitched battle over the feeder we installed on the balcony outside our bedroom. We have another, similar feeder hanging outside our sitting room balcony, and an even larger one hanging outside the windows of the dining room.

We are filling the feeders at least twice a day. We have almost gone through the 50-pound bag of sugar we bought at Costco in Denver in late spring to feed the two hives of bees we are keeping down in the hayloft of the ruined barn on the property. We've only filled the feeders for the bees twice; the hummers have sucked down all the rest.

It has gotten to the point where, when the feeders are empty, the hummingbirds will fly up in our face as if to remind us to feed them. This afternoon when I filled the big feeder off the dining room, the moment I cranked open the window to get to the feeder, I had three hummers buzzing around impatiently; they turned angry when I took the feeder away, and when I brought it back a full ten minutes later two of them landed on the perches before I even had a chance to hang it on the hook outside the window.

One flew into the office this afternoon when Julie was figuring out the sales taxes, and later I found another one trapped in the dining room trying to get to the feeder outside the window. I had to catch it and gently shoo it out the window. It immediately flew to the feeder, not a bit the worse for wear.

These creatures are fearless and violently territorial. Years ago, Julie and I visited a couple who, in their retirement, had bought an alfalfa farm down by Cortez, Colorado. At the time, we thought they were insane to work that hard in their retirement; that was before we bought the High Mountain Lodge.

Anyway, we were having breakfast one morning, and I commented on how scrappy the birds were (I'd never seen that many in one place before, being an Oklahoma boy). "Yeah," said our friend, "if they were any bigger, we'd have to shoot 'em."

At the time, I thought she was exaggerating, but a few mornings ago, when it had been warm enough overnight to leave the sliding glass door open to our balcony, the hummers started fighting over the feeder at 4:30 a.m. The noise woke both Julie and me up. Perhaps a better collective noun might be "an annoyance of hummingbirds."

We have created a monster--a collective monster. The peace and quiet of the High Mountain Lodge is now punctuated by the various and varied noises hummingbirds make. Earlier today, I was in our sitting room and began to wonder if Denver air traffic control had, for some reason, begun to divert airplanes over Grand County. But no, it was just the hummingbirds at the feeder--two, and sometimes three trying to feed from the same station.

Murphy and the Fox

We adopted Murphy when she was a year-and-a-half old. We were her fourth family. She had been bought at pet city as a Christmas present when she was six weeks old and a little ball of fur. The woman sold her when she was two months old to another woman, and that person turned Murphy into Keeshond rescue less than six months later.

The rescue folks wondered if she was adoptable. She was, according to their records, "stubborn" and had exhibited a "failure to bond" with her previous families. I have previously written in detail about Murphy (http://tjbeckhouse.wordpress.com/category/animals/), but now that we are up at the High Mountain Lodge, the vermin have gotten larger and smarter.

Keeshonden were originally bred as companion dogs in the European low country. Their alternate name is the "Dutch Barge Dog" because they were ideal dogs for the barges that were the pre-industrial revolution transportation precursors to trains. Murphy certainly is true to her breed. A consumate watch dog, she barks when anybody approaches our "barge"--the High Mountain Lodge--including guests coming over from the guest lodge for breakfast.

But nothing compares to her excitement/rage when she sees our neighborhood fox.

Forget the mice and squirrels that made her crazy at our house in Golden. Now she has bigger fish to fry (so to speak). There is a fox in the area that is absolutely unafraid of people. He's gorgeous, with a red body and a striking, bushy, gray tail.

Murphy has seen and chased him all over the mountain. He's pretty blasé about the whole thing. Evidently, this isn't the first time he's encountered an un-cool, agro dog. Just the other day, I was driving away from the lodge, and the fox was crossing the road ahead of us. I slowed down almost to a stop, mostly to get a better look at the creature.

He was gorgeous. I stopped the car while he was in the middle of the road, about ten feet in front of us. He slowly ambled over to the side of the road, and I began to edge forward. "Murphy!" I whispered. "There's the fox!"

Murphy finally saw him, concussed her head against the window glass, and set up a ruckus. The window on the fox's side of the road was down a few inches, and Murphy stuck her muzzle out and barked and roared and snarled and carried on like one of those monsters in the horror movie, The Day of the Triffids.

As I drove away, the fox began, evilly, to trot alongside the car while Murphy proceeded to lose her mind. There is encrusted dog slobber on the driver's side of our Subaru all the way the the back window that I don't know if Bon Ami and acid will ever get off. Even after we'd pulled away from the fox, Murphy continued to be beside herself. She was actually incapable of stopping barking. I pulled up in front of the Alco Department Store (Fraser, Colorado's, answer to Wall Mart), and she continued to bark at everything that moved in the parking lot.

I went into the store, and when I came out a while later, she had subsided into moans in the back seat. We drove back to the High Mountain Lodge and, as we were turning down the road, I whispered, "Murphy! Be on the lookout! Maybe you'll see the fox again."

Sometimes I surprise myself with my stupidity. That little whisper set Murphy off again. There wasn't a fox in sight, but now we have indelible dog slobber on the passenger-side of the car to balance the previous mucking of the driver's side.

Murphy was a basket case after that. She came into the lodge and fell asleep behind the couch. When our guests came to supper that evening, she pretended they weren't there.